1) why should we reward IBM when they used a bait-and-switch to get us
to buy the tools (WDSC,code/400 was "free")

IBM has explicitly stated that RDi is the supported development
environment for IBM i. Yes, someone at IBM decided to unbundle RDi from
the compilers. No, WDSC was not ever free - we paid for it somewhere,
whether the price was buried in the OS, the RPG compiler or in the
software maintenance contract. The fact is that we were always paying
for RDi. Now, the charges for RDi are clear and up front instead of
buried somewhere. Yes, the accounting change was annoying. No, it
hasn't actually cost our organisation more money. The last
software/hardware upgrade we made gave us more horsepower, a faster tape
drive, IBM i 7.1 plus RDi for less total dollars than the previous
lease. Your mileage may vary.

2) why should we pay for IBM's IDE, for you old RPG green-screen
programmers... our PHP, js, html programmers just love their free
IDE's?

Mihael Schmidt has done some pioneering work with RPG Next Genhttp://rpgnextgen.com/ He gets precious little support or even feedback
from the midrange community. At the moment, RPG Next Gen doesn't
support SEP debugging, which has probably paid for our 6 seats of RDi by
itself.

Yes, Eclipse is free for the cost of the download. No, it doesn't
understand RPG, DDS or CL. Visual Studio doesn't understand DB2 for i
and it can't do SEP debugging. Forget browsing a library or running PDM
options against source members or objects in the QSYS.LIB file system.
So yes, those programmers have free IDEs. We don't. Or rather, we
don't bother to support the one guy who's trying to give us one. Here
in the real world, in 2014, there is no alternative to RDi.

One other thing that didn't apply in our group: RDi comes from IBM.
Some developers are restricted to 'no third party anything'. Only what
IBM provides and nothing else.

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